Category: Rants

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I’m Really Starting To HATE Apple

Rant incoming.

It wasn’t the “liquid glass” user interface per se. It wasn’t the overly rounded corners on every. damned. window (annoying, but not a total deal breaker). It was the fact that so. much. stuff. was broken. What am I talking about? MacOS 26, aka “Tahoe” of course!

A few days ago I reached my breaking point with things spontaneously opening, Safari refusing to load websites, and numerous other glitches too numerous to mention. As much as I knew it was going to be a pain to go back to Sequoia, I knew it had to be done to maintain my sanity. My only real concern was that when I tried to downgrade another Apple OS many years ago, I learned that with each OS upgrade, Apple also changed the mail database structure, making it impossible to open any locally stored mailboxes once you’ve downgraded to an earlier version. Throwing caution to the wind, however, after verifying the previous night’s full-disc backup was good and creating a Sequoia installer USB, I erased the main drive and set about reinstalling the previous O/S.

After I got Sequoia up and running, I did not use the Migration Assistant to restore all my files and settings from the backup because I didn’t want to transfer all the extra, obsolete garbage that had accumulated over the past several years and O/S installations. So I started reinstalling applications and transferring everything manually.

I was about a quarter of the way through it when I thought, “What if there’s nothing wrong with Tahoe, but rather it was just dealing with all that detritus from previous installations?

So I booted into the recovery partition, verified that “Reinstall Tahoe” was an option (since my previous Tahoe installation had overwritten the recovery partition), and went ahead and erased the drive and started fresh. I booted back into the recovery partition and this time, instead of being greeted with the “Reinstall Tahoe” option, the only thing I had available was “Reinstall Sequoia.” 

What the fuck?

Since I had little choice at this point but to reinstall Sequoia again in order to install a fresh copy of Tahoe, I shut down, inserted the Sequoia boot USB (because it would be quicker than downloading from the internet, which is what that recovery partition option would do), rebooted, and loaded the O/S again from the USB. This still wasn’t ideal since in order to get a clean Tahoe install I would have to install over the clean Sequoia install.

Now if I’d been thinking (which clearly I hadn’t been), I would’ve created a Tahoe USB installer which would have allowed me a new pristine installation of Tahoe to test my theory. But I wasn’t. And I didn’t.

TLDR: After nearly 48 hours, I finally have a functioning system again. At one point yesterday I told Ben, “I quit Windows because of it taking an entire day to rebuild and restore a PC!”  I finally gave up on the Tahoe experiment and late last evening I was finally back up and running with a clean install of Sequoia. Everything I tested worked (with a couple notable exceptions below), and in some cases, worked in ways they hadn’t worked in years. (Did you know you were supposed to get audible notifications when new mail arrived?)

Speaking of mail…my worries about the mail databases was unfounded. I was able to import the original mailboxes without any issues popping up. So that had changed since the last time I attempted it. (Mountain Lion or Mavericks as I remember.)

I realized this morning I’d transferred all my music and the associated library file but had failed to actually start up the Music app to verify that everything worked.  I did that and it balked at the library file. “Cannot use library file because it was created by a later version of MacOS.”

Fuck me.

I’d dodged that bullet with my mail files, but apparently I wasn’t going to be so lucky with my music collection. Visions of me having to reassign thousands of pieces of album art to my collection flashed before my eyes. But what was I gonna do? I went ahead and imported all the files and afterward was pleasantly surprised to see that all but a few dozen recordings were missing art. That I could live with and correct as time allowed.

The other issue that I’m still dealing with is XNView (the application I started using several years ago to catalog and view images when Adobe Bridge started glitching too much) can no longer preview or internally view .pdf files. A prerequisite for this functionality is that Ghostscript is present on the system, so I dutifully installed GS via Homebrew. Despite it being installed, XNView refuses to acknowledge its presence. XNView also insisted on starting fresh when I opened it, even though the configuration files were transferred from my backup. Normally this wouldn’t be horrible because I can recreate all the customization, but I also lost the markers that I’d assigned to individual images to indicate if I’d blogged them, and no matter what I do I have been unable to bring them back.

So if you start noticing duplicates on VoenixRising, you’ll know why.

If I start the application via the terminal everything works, so that tells me Ghostscript is installed correctly. The path to Ghostscript is in the path (I think. Setting paths in MacOS is not anywhere near as simple as it is in Windows), but when starting XNView directly, it’s not finding it.

So this is what I’ve been banging my head against all afternoon, with no resolution in sight.

Oh…and for some reason, two of my contacts absolutely refused to sync from iCloud back to the Mac—but I was able to recreate them locally.

So that’s where we stand this evening. Good, but not great. If there are any Mac users out there who are familiar with setting paths (or getting Ghostscript to be recognized by programs that need it), I’d love to hear from you.

 

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A Rant. To Be Filed Under…

…if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

I went on kind of a Madonna buying binge last week:

    • Music
    • Bedtime Stories
    • Like a Virgin
    • GHV2 Greatest Hits Volume 2
    • You Can Dance
    • Ray of Light

I ordered these from a single seller off Discogs, a website that has—up until this point at least—been a reliable source for buying used media. But I guess there are bad apples in any bunch.

The seller described the CDs themselves as MINT or NEAR MINT. The cases were also uniformly rated VERY GOOD+.

The low prices probably should’ve thrown up a red flag: $5 apiece, with only two being priced at $10 (one of which was described as STILL SEALED), but it still seemed reasonable considering it was Madonna and there were dozens of copies of each title available on the site—especially since all of them were described as LOOKS UNPLAYED with one (Bedtime Stories) being hyperbolically described as “LOOKS UNPLAYED – WAS BOUGHT FROM A REAL MADONNA FAN NEXT TO THE LAUNDROMAT IN STAR CITY.” Okay, whatever.

I checked the seller’s customer satisfaction rating and it was 98.9%.  Not perfect, but not horrible.

The disks arrived taped together in a package made of solid-color bubblewrap. My heart sank before I even got them unwrapped, fully expecting the center retaining clips of each case to be snapped off and all the hinges broken.

It turned out that was the least of the problems. (I have spare cases on hand, just for this eventuality so it was no big deal.)

First off, I found it odd that there were more discs than I’d ordered. For some reason she’d also included American Life (sans case, but with the front booklet), I’m Breathless, Something to Remember (both complete and in good condition) and The Power of Goodbye CD single.

Even without the breakage, none of the jewel cases could be described as VERY GOOD+.

And then I discovered that Ray of Light—something I did order and wanted—was just an empty case—with a $1.99 Goodwill price sticker on it, no less—that contained no CD at all!

What the actual fuck?!

I think what happened is that she realized that she was missing the disc for Ray of Light and instead of being an upstanding seller and actually contacting me before shipment and asking what I wanted to do*, just threw a few extra CDs in to apparently make up for it.

To her credit, the discs are in decent shape. There’s only one that has some light scratches that plays okay in every player I own except that temperamental D-10. (I’m making my way through the stack as I type.) But c’mon girl. If you didn’t have something I ordered you should’ve contacted me, not just thrown in some consolation prizes because. It’s just common courtesy.

Needless to say, the feedback I left will further contribute to her sub-99% approval rating. And I just ordered a MINT copy of Ray of Light from a seller with a 100% approval rating for $2.99 so there’s that…

*I had just this scenario happen earlier this morning with a different seller who realized the item he was selling and that I bought didn’t match the “official” photos of that particular release. As it turned out, it wasn’t the version I wanted and told him to cancel the order and just refund me the purchase price. That is a responsible seller!

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A Rant

Hey KJZZ…we know Phoenix is a vast radio wasteland. It has been for years. But I find it ironic that you (with those call letters, no less)—one of only two oases in that wasteland of talking heads, top 40 hits on endless repeat, and mariachi-laden Spanish-language programs—only actually broadcast jazz four days a week from 8pm to 1am. Otherwise it’s all non-stop NPR and local news that is on repeat all fucking day.

Yeah, I know you have a second, HD channel that does play jazz all day, something I can get on my car receiver—but I’m not in my car all day. I also know you have an internet stream that mirrors the HD offering. But KUVO in Denver also has a stream available and their programming is hands-down a hell of a lot better than yours.

/rant

Sorry. It’s been a horrible day.

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Triptych

Dude, we get it. You’ve got a big dick and you like to go out in public in sweatpants without underwear and show it off.

(I don’t know if this guy is a professional “adult entertainer” or not, but when I initially ran across him a year or so ago he piqued my interest because he came off as just a regular guy who loved to show off his hairy pits. But then I stumbled across him on Instagram and his entire feed is nothing but reels of him hard in his sweatpants with guys either reaching for objects and brushing against his tool or him just showing off how the ridge of his glans is clearly visible. Dude, we get it. You’re hot. You’re cute. And more than a few of us would undoubtedly get nasty with you if the opportunity presented itself. But you’ve gotta step up your game!)

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Friday

Today was my first day back at work after being out all week with a particularly nasty bout of bronchitis. One of the joys of being married to an educator is the gifts they invariably bring home from the little walking bags of pus they call their students.

A trip to urgent care, an antihistamine that knocks me on my ass, and halfway through a z-pack later, I finally felt good enough to drag myself into the office today. One of my colleagues took a personal discretionary (i.e. mental health) day, and another is out (or at least working from home) for an unspecified length of time that may range as long as 4-6 weeks to care for his wife that had brain surgery last week. Good times!

My boss was naturally glad to hear that I was returning, because he had been hoping to take the afternoon off to spend some time with his son who is on spring break. And Elphaba gets very upset if there’s no one in the office—even though everyone may be working.

I was greeted by 215 emails, 98% of which were totally irrelevent and quickly “marked as read.” For better or worse, we are a good team, and when one or more of us is out, the others pitch in to keep the wheels of gub’mint turning.

But enough about that.

Warning: Geek Rant Ahead

As I mentioned earlier, I’m on a new liquid antihistamine that—while it does work quite well—is also prescribed as a sedative, a sleep-aid, and an anti-psychotic. I missed taking my first dose, but took one last night and its after-effects lingered all day. By mid afternoon I wanted nothing more than to go home and crawl into bed and nap.

Unfortunately, as my boss was leaving for the day he mentioned that a user was coming down at 4 pm to drop off her laptop for reimaging. It had some strange Office shit going on, and after all of us had looked at it and couldn’t get it running correctly we decided to nuke it from orbit. “It’s the only way to be sure.”

“Since you leave at 4:30, just get the imaging started and let it run. I’ll have Chris finish it up on Monday since you and I are both WFH then.”

Of course the bitch shows up late—without the power brick. “Don’t you have any spares?” she asked. “Not for that model, and it takes a very specific wattage.”

I could almost hear her mutter “Fuck me” under her breath as she went back upstairs to retrieve the power brick. She returned several minutes later with her docking station and it’s power brick (which has a barrel-type connector and not a USB-C). “Weren’t you given a separate power brick to carry with you when you take this home?” “No, I just take the dock home with me.”

Well, fuck me. These Dell 5570s require a special 130-watt brick, and while I had one, it was already in use imaging a different 5570. I told her thank you and said I would make it work.

She walked off and I interrupted the other image process and used the power supply on this machine. I recoiled when opening the lid; it was another one of those laptops that had obviously been used at home as an impromptu Hor d’oeuvres tray. Out came canned air and the Clorox wipes.

At this point it was nearly 4:30 and I knew I wouldn’t be getting out of there any time soon. I plugged the rest of the connectors in and booted into the USB stick that would connect to the imaging server and start the process. I was inputting the required information and realized she hadn’t left her password and I didn’t know if she’d run the backup script that stores all her data and settings from the machine on her network share. So I backed out, rebooted, and logged in with my credentials to see if she had the script on her desktop; that would tell me she’d done it.

Simultaneously I texted my boss and asked if he’d backed her up when he was working on this and he said he had, but that he had to direct everything to her OneDrive because she didn’t have a network share.

“Why does that set all my alarm bells off?” I asked.

“There’s a copy of the backup folder on the c-drive as well,” he said.

Yeah, but if I wipe and reimage the machine that will disappear as well.

So I went back to my own laptop and created a network share for this bitch (because that’s where the restore script will pull from, not some nebulous place on her OneDrive) and physically copied the contents of that c-drive backup folder over to it.

It took nearly 30 minutes. Nearly 60 gigabytes worth of crap. Yeah, she’s one of our engineers so she has every program under the sun installed—and because she had no network share, all that data was stored locally, but she is also one of these folks who seems to think her workstation is also her personal computer. Yeah, I saw lots of file names flash by during the transfer of things that should definitely not be on a work computer.

At around 5 pm the transfer was complete. I power cycled the computer and booted into the USB stick. About four steps in, I realized that I’d mistyped the computer name. This is something that could’ve been “fixed in post” as they say, but it was easier to do it then before the process started.

Except…while I could click on the clear-field button, now I wasn’t able to type anything new into the name field. I thought that was odd, so I backed out to the previous step and tried again. Same thing happened. I powered down completely and powered the machine back up. I pressed F12 to get into the startup options menu to select the USB stick and…nothing. The machine booted into the previously installed O/S. After trying this several times, it wouldn’t even get that far, giving me the message “Something went wrong,” and gave me the dreaded blue screen. I rebooted again. Still no response from the keyboard.

Fuck. Me. The damn keyboard had died or fried—probably from one of the dozens of crumbs that I had removed.

By this point it was past 5:20 pm, and already physically spent, I said to hell with it and powered it down. Bitch ain’t gonna get it back on Monday, that’s for sure. I packed up, got the hell outta there and then hit 15 out of 18 stop lights red on the commute home. Because of course.

 

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A Work Week From Hell

Three more years. Just keep telling yourself it’s only three more years until retirement.

You may have noticed that the blog has been relatively quiet this week.

On Monday (one of my two weekly work from home days) I was greeted by this email from my immediate supervisor:

Fellas, this week might be a bit challenging as I will be out of the office starting tomorrow for shoulder surgery and B. is out the whole week with some personal health and some significant primary residence issues.  It would be best if you guys could come into the office as much as possible this week so we have in office coverage.  I will ask L. to send out an email to staff about limited IT support this week but I’ll let you guys coordinate what you can on in office coverage for what works best for you two.  Definitely going to need you both to step up a bit more this week while we are so limited on team resources and staff being out.

Mark, you will be in charge of all desktop support and coverage tasking C. where and when you need assistance for things you need help on (F. may be able to assist on some things as well, just communicate any needs clearly).  C. has a very full plate too with coverage on projects and application/system support (SharePoint SPO migration for August go live is a big one) F. can also provide support with communication and follow through on SPO and other things as they come up.  Just keep her posted on what you need help with. 

C. will be in charge this week and I have delegated control to him for while I will be out. FYI  please check in with C. for all supervisory matters while I’m out of the office, as he is the boss this week.

If anything major comes up or you have issues anywhere please keep L. in the loop and she will give guidance on how to proceed or handle.

We all have our professional crosses to bear, and B. has been mine—especially over the last few months.

Since May, he has taken a two week vacation (because apparently his adult daughter is incapable of driving across country by herself), returned to work for a week, followed by another two week vacation “building a deck” for said daughter in Florida, followed by one week back at work, and lastly followed by yet another week-long vacation spent on a cruise. Each of those vacations were augmented by a spur-of-the-moment extra day tacked on one or both ends of his official time off.

We’re a small team, and when even one of us is gone, it affects all of us. But with B. being gone for these extended periods, and now, most recently gone cruising for a week followed by yet another week-long absence has left me stressed to the point where I know I will be getting sick—for realz—sometime within the next week. I know that simply because I know how my body deals with this kind of stress.

We normally have about 50 work-in-progress tickets on any given day, constantly churning as some are knocked out only to be replaced by new ones. Some are easy and some require more expertise than just any one of us on our own possesses.

This past week, the ticket count has been consistently hovering over 120, with fully half of those open or not even acknowledged because we simply do not have the manpower.

Even before the clusterfuck that B’s serial vacations created, it was commonly acknowledged that we needed at least more more technician, but what did they do? They hired a fucking project manager (F. in the email from my boss) who doesn’t have anything to do with the day-to-day operations of I.T. in our department.

Adding to the clusterfuck that was this past week, after a period of six months where we were unable to order any new equipment from Dell because of contract issues, everything was resolved and the backlog of requests were finally ordered and they started pouring in over the past three weeks. Everything’s been sitting in our lab awaiting imaging and deployment because, again—we don’t have the manpower to deal with any of it.

So midweek, someone in their infinite wisdom decided to call upon the talents of a not-official-but-knows-I.T. person working in another division in our department to help with the imaging of the equipment since I—who usually handle this task—was absolutely inundated with trouble tickets and break/fix requests.

Okay, the guy may know I.T. stuff, but he didn’t know how we did things, so an entire day was spent—pulled away from the tasks that were already bearing down on me—to get him up to speed on how we got equipment ready to go out. Every task in the process was met with a question. And when he wasn’t questioning why something was done in a particular manner, he was just constantly trying to engage me in pointless conversation.

LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE TO CONCENTRATE ON MY OWN WORK YOU CUNT!

“You don’t look good in an orange jumpsuit…you don’t look good in an orange jumpsuit…you don’t look good in an orange jumpsuit…” became my mantra this week.

If all this weren’t enough, it seemed that even the most basic of procedures—things that would normally take a few moments at most to accomplish—were taking hours because nothing was working.

I found myself uttering, “because of course it doesn’t” or “because of course it does” more times than I care to mention.

Wednesday I came home and did something I haven’t done for more than a decade. I sat on the sofa, chatted with Ben for a few minutes and then went upstairs and crashed. I slept until around 9:30 when I got up, came back downstairs, ate a bowl of cereal, and went back to bed for the night an hour later.

Both my boss and B. have been curiously silent in our group chat this week, and at this point I won’t be the least bit surprised if we get another email on Monday telling us that he and B. are both going to be out for another week. I took my laptop home this afternoon and will be treating Monday as a WFH day—just like this past week—even if that dreaded email arrives.

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An Email from Elphaba Throppe

We’ve had a new middle manager for less than a year. She came from another division, where she had been working as a senior Desktop Tech. Why they hired her is beyond me, because she is so obviously in over her head it ceased being funny about two weeks after she assumed command.

Micro-managing is her modus operandi, and my immediate supervisor (he reports to her) has had to tell her to back off several times; that we are his team (she oversees two teams in our department) and it is not her job to direct our daily activities.

I started referring to her privately as Elphaba several months ago. [The name is more indicative of The Wizard of Oz than of Wicked, BTW.]

Since before the lockdown there were plans to expand and reorganize our work area. All of that got put on hold during the pandemic, but now that we’re all back in the office (in my team’s case, three days a week), apparently it’s now time to do this. I’m not thrilled about the reconfiguration because I’m currently tucked away in a spot between a column and a window that overlooks the street below. It’s cozy, it’s quiet, I’m not immediately visible the minute you walk in the department, and the location allows me a degree of privacy to work without unnecessary interruption since we get a lot of walk-ups and drive-by users who—no matter how many times we tell them—are incapable of understanding the concept that we need a ticket from the Service Desk to do anything, thinking that if they pay a personal visit it will drive home how important their particular issue is.

Anyhow, we got an email from Elphaba early last week (names redacted to protect the innocent) that went something like this:

Hello IT Team,

I have an update on the schedule and the arrangements I have shared earlier in my email below on 6/2/22.

Goodmans are still scheduled to perform the work on Thursday June 23rd, however they will take longer than just a day and need to start the prep work a day earlier. So the new schedule for this work is from next Wednesday June 22nd till the following Monday June 27th. During that time, we only need 1 person from the IT team to be working in the office, at a temp cubicle outside of [Director]’s office, it is [Programmer who is no longer with the enterprise]’s old cubicle (her name plate is still on it).

On the day of the 21st:

We need to disconnect all devices within the IT area and pack all items in boxes and move them to the south west conference room by [Director]’s Office.

[Immediate supervisor] you can pack your stuff on the 17th before you go on vacation and put the boxes in my office if you like, or you can keep them in the vacant cubicle in your [Remote programmer]’s area  and we will move them with everything else to the south west conference room on the 21st.

[Colleague #1] since you telework on Tuesdays, you can pack on Friday the 17th as well, as Monday the 20th is a Holiday.

Mark and [Colleague #2], you are scheduled to work in the office and will pack your stuff before you leave for the day.

On the day of the 22nd:

We have [Immediate supervisor] out of the office (on vacation)

Mark is teleworking

[Colleague #1] and [Colleague #2] are scheduled to work in the office. I want to ask [Colleague #1] to telework on that day, and [Colleague #2] to provide in-person coverage. Please use the temporary location identified above for that day.

The IT area will not be accessible to any of us for the entire day.

On the day of the 23rd:

We have [Immediate supervisor] out of the office (on vacation)

[Colleague #2] and [Colleague #1] are teleworking

Mark is scheduled to work in the office to provide in-person coverage. Please use the temporary location identified above for that day.

The IT area will not be accessible to any of us for the entire day while Goodmans are working.

 On the day of the 24th:

We have [Immediate supervisor] out of the office (on vacation)

[Colleague #2] is teleworking

Mark and [Colleague #1] are scheduled to work in the office. I want to ask Mark to telework on that day, and [Colleague #1] to provide in-person coverage. Please use the temporary location identified above for that day.

The IT area will not be accessible to any of us for the entire day.

On the day of the 27th:

We have [Colleague #2] out of the office (on vacation)

[Immediate supervisor] and Mark are teleworking

[Colleague #1] is scheduled to work in the office to provide in-person coverage. Please use the temporary location identified above for that day.

The IT area will not be accessible to any of us for the entire day.

On the day of the 28th:

We need to bring everything back and unpack our stuff and reconnect all devices.

Mark and [Immediate supervisor] will be working in the office that day and will be moving everything back to the NEW IT area.

[Colleague #1] can connect his devices on the next day Wednesday the 29th.

[Colleague #2] can connect his devices after he is back from his vacation on Tuesday July 5th.

If any of the details provided above is changed I will update you. If you have any questions please let me know.

Because apparently we are incapable of orchestrating this incredibly difficult bit of logistics ourselves…

After I finished reading this, my initial reaction was to text my supervisor who was sitting about fifteen feet away—and based on his facial expression had also just read the email. My first impulse was to say, “I’m sure she had a wet spot on her seat when she finished writing that,” but it would’ve been wildly inappropriate even for me (and I’m not known among my colleagues for mincing words). Instead, I just wrote, “Would it be unprofessional if I just responded, Whatever.“?

He said that yes, yes it would be.

So instead I just responded to the email with, “Acknowledged.”

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Venting

WARNING: This is gonna be a long one. You might just wanna skip over and head to the next nekkid man.

It started out simply enough. I wanted to throw together a document at work that explains the new way one of our home-brew applications works. It’s something I regularly do and add to our department OneNote binder.

I made an initial screenshot and was surprised that I wasn’t offered the option of opening it in Paint 3D as was usually the case. I went to open the application directly and it wasn’t there. I had just used it a few days ago, but now it was gone. Completely.

How the fuck does that happen?

Suspecting that someone in Main ITS had been fucking around with something, I checked with a colleague to see if he had it on his workstation. He reported that no, it was gone from his as well.

Okay, I thought. No big deal. I’ll just go out to the Microsoft Store and download it again.

What. The. Fuck?

Now I knew that Main ITS had locked down the store tighter than a virgin asshole, forcing us to use our corporate ID to access the store and then only offering a small smattering of apps to download, but I’d never run into it being blocked completely.

Maybe it was something with my ID? I logged out of the machine and logged back in with my administrative ID. Same issue. The same ID I use to set up new machines and update the pre-installed Store apps that ITS put on the image.

I logged into a desktop machine I use for purely administrative tasks and saw that Paint 3D was missing there as well. I attempted to reach the store on that machine and it got me right in. This was getting really weird.

I immediately suspected this was related to the fact that I had Windows 11 on my laptop and my admin desktop was still on Windows 10.

I went ahead and submitted a ticket about the missing application and the fact that the store was blocked on my laptop—knowing full well the Help Desk would just turn around and throw them back in our queue. To their credit, they only threw the “store blocked” ticket back at us. I got a call from a guy asking about the Paint 3D and he told me he could make it available in SCCM/Software Center for a direct download.

Sure enough, about ten minutes later I checked and it was available to download.

And the download failed. Repeatedly. I even rebooted to make sure.

I believe it was failing because it was trying to open the Microsoft Store, and since I couldn’t get there to begin with it wouldn’t install.

My next thought was that something in my profile on the machine was causing all these issues; some obscure bit flipped the wrong way. Recreating my profile from scratch would solve the issue surely.

Don’t call me Shirley.

I logged back into the machine with my admin profile, renamed my regular user profile folder with a .bak extension, and cleared out the reference to that profile in the registry (exporting it to a .reg file first…just in case I needed it later.)

Logged out, logged in with my regular user credentials and waited while the machine churned away creating the profile. It churned and it churned, and after about 5 minutes I left to use the bathroom. When I got back ten minutes later it had logged in. But the task bar at the bottom of the screen was completely blank. No start button, no application icons, no clock…nothing.

I rebooted and logged back in. Same thing happened.

I went through the entire process one more time. Same result. Searching the internet for “empty task bar windows 11” brought up several solutions, none of which worked in my particular case.

It was time go go nuclear.

Due to the amount of additional applications and customization I’d done to my laptop, the last thing I wanted to do was wipe the entire thing and start fresh. The hardware was also going on five years old, so it was beyond time for me to replace it with something newer and the only thing which had prevented me from doing so for the last several months was the amount of work needed to put everything back the way it was. But now I was forced.

It was already late in the afternoon, but I manager to get a much newer laptop imaged almost precisely at quitting time. I thought I’d join it to the domain, load the half dozen default applications that are not part of the base image, get my standard account logged in and VPN set up and leave the rest (that I could do remotely) for the next day, which was a scheduled WFH day.

It wouldn’t let me join the domain. My admin account was now locked out because of too many failed login attempts.

WHAT. THE.  FUCK.

I called the Help Desk to have the account unlocked (because my colleagues had all left for the day) and was informed that “We can’t unlock admin accounts. I’ll open a ticket for Security & Identity Management.”

I told him not to bother. I was just going to go home and let it reset itself overnight. I realized any thought of working from home the next day had been destroyed as I could not remotely do any of the remaining tasks necessary to get a functioning laptop.

I texted my boss and let him know what had happened and that I’d be coming into the office tomorrow (today)…but just long enough to get my laptop functioning again and then would finish out the day at home. He was fine with that.

As I texted Ben as I left work, “I have never had a more emotionally frustrating day at work than I had today.”

Fortunately, by noon today I got everything up and restored on the new laptop and was back home shortly after lunch.

I also did not update this machine to Windows 11—nor do I plan to.

2025 cannot come quickly enough.

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Form Over Function, a Rant

I like the Apple bluetooth keyboard. I am probably one of the few people you’ll meet who actually likes the ergonomics the Apple Magic Mouse (I have since it was originally introduced years ago). But put the two of them together on my desk and it’s a disaster. The edge of the keyboard is exactly the height of the metal portion of the mouse, so they’re constantly colliding, and as you can see from the picture above, it happens so often that the anodized coating has worn off the corner of the keyboard. Because, you know, Apple couldn’t have made the keyboard a millimeter or two thicker…it would’ve offended Jony Ive’s aesthetic, after all.

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“GeT oFF mY LaWN!”

A long-simmering rant:

Okay, as a long-time “content creator” blogger I have to say it:

I hate, hate, hate all the new graphic file formats. I don’t care if it’s GIFV, WEBP or HEIC. They all need to die in a fire. Right now compatibility is non-existent, and merely reposting something I find online often involves downloading it—and if I can’t convert it to something usable like JPG or GIF in-house—uploading it to a website to convert and then downloading the image file a second time. It’s a pain in the fucking ass.

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Is It Something in the Air? Some Kind of Planetary Alignment?

A Rant…

There is something going on with Starbucks today.

Ben is doing his SAT thing today, so I’m taking the opportunity to run errands, wash the car…that sort of stuff. I’d planned on also grabbing breakfast and spending some time at Starbucks blogging (or more likely discretely looking at nekkid menz to blog later).

The first one I went to—one of our regular haunts—was absolutely insane. Normally on a weekend there are at most ten people in the store and probably half that in the drive thru. Today the drive thru was backed up onto the street and the parking lot was nearly full. When I walked in I was greeted by twenty or so people waiting for their orders, while half that number were waiting in line to order.

NOPE!

I hit another one of our favorites, and was greeted by a sign saying, “Our cafe is closed. Please use our drive thru!”

NOPE!

The one next closest to our house—normally deserted whenever we go there—looked like this:

Since I took that picture the line waiting to order has stretched to the front door, including a group of six blonde sorority clones—all glued to their bling-cased phones. Are the holiday drinks that popular?!

UPDATE: This store threw us all out at 12:30 and closed for the day.

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Something I’ve Noticed…

…since lockdowns ended is how awful a large majority of the driving public has become. I don’t know if they’re simply not paying attention, are distracted by their phones, or that they simply don’t give a fuck about anyone but themselves, but it seems a lot of people have lost all spacial awareness whatsoever.

Wanna change lanes? Just swerve over. Never mind that there’s someone already in that lane. Almost missed your turn? Don’t worry! Come to a complete STOP and then slowly turn into the parking lot. Speed limit? What speed limit? Speed limits are for libtards and losers!

“TRAFFIC RULES ARE IMPINGING ON MY FREEDUMBS!!”

That is honestly what I’m beginning to think is going through a lot of the bobbleheads out there right now.

I mean I get it. There have always been bad drivers. I will readily admit that I’m not the best one out there either, but OMG…I used to see something stupid maybe a couple times a week, and now it’s every damn day! Sometimes multiples times in a day!

End of rant.

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A Steaming Pile

But unfortunately, it’s a necessary part of my workflow. Since I moved to Mac from Windows a dozen years ago, I have continually mourned the loss of Thumbs Plus, an image cataloging/manipulation program that IMHO is second to none.

Adobe Bridge is the only thing on a Mac that even remotely comes close to the functionality of Thumbs Plus.  I can display images with title, size, date, and a host of other data all displayed under each thumbnail image—something that none of Bridge’s Mac competitors seem to be able to do. It also does this without requiring that you create a catalog file like Apple’s own Photos or the several third-party applications I’ve tried over the years. The biggest problem I run into when trying to change to a new application is that while Bridge will do X, Y, and Z, the alternatives do X and Y, but not Z. Or Z and Y, but not X.

It’s frustrating as hell.

I’ve used Bridge long enough now that I can generally beat it back into submission when it misbehaves, but since getting the M1 MBP, it takes forever to generate thumbnails and searching for solutions online has been fruitless.

Bridge has always been a steaming pile of crap, but the last few iterations have been among the worst I’ve encountered. I can live with it just spontaneously shutting down, or randomly rearranging the workspace, but waiting minutes to generate thumbnails—even in the same folder…one I was just working in a few minutes prior—is just unacceptable.

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#Mood

Alternating between this…
…and this. 

I do not like being back in the office. To minimize my possible exposure to the Covid, I am isolated from the few people who also have to physically be present within these walls, but that’s not really the issue. What has sent me into a tailspin this week is the frustration I’m feeling at this whole process that I have to physically be present for. I suppose it’s at least partly my own fault, setting up what I see now was an entirely unrealistic expectation that somehow I’d be able to crank out 150 (now mysteriously increased to over 200) machines in one week and be back in the safety of my own home thereafter.

But alas, that was not meant to be. An entire day was wasted because none of the jacks in the lab were live. Makes it hard to talk to the server that’s serving up the images to be laid down on the machines. While waiting,  I went ahead and hooked up eight laptops to the switch and power strip—only to be informed once the jacks were live that I was now supposed to concentrate on getting the tablets out first. So everything had to be disconnected.

The image for the tablets had problems with the audio driver. Not insurmountable; I could always manually install it after the fact, but it was just one more roadblock that stood in the way of me getting back home. So I went ahead and prepped 10 tablets for our field workers, and as I was getting ready to provide the cellular info to our phone person…discovered these tablets had been ordered without any cellular capability. “Oh, we’ll have to get with Emily to see if she has any cell-equipped tablets we can swap these out for.”

So another day wasted. “Go ahead and start the laptops until we get the other tablets.”

(It turns out that none of the tablets that were ordered came with cellular. Go figger.)

The laptop image was completely fucked. The guy who builds the images was fucking around with the image and uploading it to the server while I was downloading them. (Of course I didn’t know this until the whole process hung and reached out to him to find out what the FUCK was going on.)

“Go ahead and start over. I made some changes to the audio drivers on both the laptops and the tablets.”

The laptops ran through the install process…and then would hang when rebooting. Consistently.

Meanwhile there’s all this pressure coming down from my supervisor wondering how soon they can start rolling these out. (Thankfully I’m not involved in that process.)

There seems to be a lot going on behind the scenes that I’m not privy to. As I wrote earlier, we’ve been without a department supervisor for a month now, and the woman who is reluctantly acting as “interim” supervisor is a micromanaging [fill in appropriate descriptive word of your choosing].

For the life of me, I do not understand the urgency at getting this equipment out. Everyone has been doing just fine with the machines main ITS gave out back in May, so I simply don’t get why this has suddenly become a hair-on-fire emergency to get all the desktops swapped out with portable devices right now. It’s not like there’s going to be a cost savings on VPN licensing or anything.

So as of today I’m still dead in the water with the laptops. The audio driver issue with the tablets still hasn’t been fully resolved, but a manual uninstall and reinstall seems to take care of it. I had been simply joining the machines to the domain and adding the various administrative accounts to the machine before handing them off to my colleagues, but after today’s barely tolerable department meeting I said fuck it and decided to do it the right way, and went back to doing the “normal” amount of post-imaging work (installing specific applications, etc.) before passing them on. It slows the process down a bit, but at least I know they’re going out the door with everything installed and working the way it should be. I’ll not have us being accused of rushing crap out the door the way main ITS was back in May. (Things that still aren’t working because they’re locked down and they refuse to give us admin rights on the machines so we can—you know—actually fix their messes.)

My mood improved somewhat this afternoon when I finally accepted that conservatively, I was probably going to be going into the office for the next month at least, even though we are still on work-from-home orders until mid October. Of course with Governor Douchebag opening up the entire state again, who knows if I’ll ever be working from home again.

Four days work. I had hoped to get this many devices done per DAY.

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Done With It

It should come as no surprise that the same people who wait until the last minute to request VPN to work from home are also the most clueless individuals in our organization.

Those higher up the IT chain have decided that in the interest of corporate security, they need to lock things down a bit, so as of last week we were no longer able to request VPN access for users who were using their personal computers to get on the enterprise network via VPN. Makes sense, considering how vulnerable to attack the vast majority of home PCs are.

So the new protocol requires getting the name of the enterprise PC the users will be taking home, their personal cell number (for 2-factor authentication required for the initial install of the client), and a list of applications they need to access that would be inaccessible if they weren’t granted VPN access. Simple stuff, right?

In theory, yes. But then I end up with users like the guy I had today who was requesting VPN for three of his direct reports. First email request asking for these three items was returned with only the PC name for one of his reports. Second was only the list of applications that the three employees would be using. Finally, when I told this user his request could not be fulfilled without the other PC names and cell phone numbers did I get all the info required. “I guess you guys are really busy right now, huh?”

Why yes. Yes we are. Because of people like you who can’t read an email all the way through.

After the accounts were created, I sent out emails to the employees, telling them they were set up on the back end and providing instructions on how to install the client on their company devices. As a courtesy I cc’d the guy who’d put in the initial request for them.

I immediately get an email from the genius saying, “[Employee Name] isn’t in the office today.”

So? SO? How does this affect ANYTHING I just emailed you?

But you know what irritates me more than this generic brand of cluelessness? It’s the people that somehow think everything is still business as usual and can’t understand that certain things they used to take for granted simply cannot be done at the moment.

No Karen, you can’t just “stop by and pick up a projector for a meeting.”

Firstly, there’s a skeleton crew in the office to begin with and absolutely no one in I.T. is onsite, and secondly, who are you scheduling a meeting with considering no one is in the office?!

SMDH.

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“It Just Works”

Another Apple rant. Quelle surprise.

I ran across a post today that was pointing out it’s been 22 years since Madonna released Ray of Light (something I noted here last month.) and this made me realize I hadn’t heard the album in quite some time, so I went to fire it up in iTunes. It wasn’t there.

This was odd because I know I’d purchased the album years ago and if I wasn’t mistaken I’d even transferred it to my phone about six months ago. I checked my phone, and it was conspicuously absent as well. I looked up my purchases so I could download it again, thinking that perhaps I’d inadvertently deleted it from iTunes.

Sure enough, it was showing “purchased,” but there was no option to download it again. After about a half hour of sleuthing, I discovered that it—and in fact MY EVERY PURCHASE I EVER MADE THROUGH ITUNES—was now located in “hidden” purchases!

It didn’t seem that I was missing music from the library, and several of the “hidden” purchases played just fine, but nevertheless I started manually unhiding all the purchases, ONE BY ONE—because Apple—of course there was no option to unhide everything all at once. (Actually there was a button to “unhide all,” but once again—because Apple—clicking on it didn’t do a damned thing.) I gave up after restoring the two missing Madonna albums that were actually gone from my library and about a couple dozen other items, because I realized this is not how I intended to spend the rest of my afternoon.

After the two missing Madonna albums were visible again, I was able to download them.

What’s weird is that it looked like the rest of my purchased music was still in my library…

IT JUST WORKS. IT JUST WORKS. IT JUST WORKS, GODDAMNIT. YOU’RE JUST USING IT WRONG!

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These Two…?

I stumbled across “The Morgan Brothers” on my Instagram some time ago and as much as I’ve wanted to, I’ve been resisting the urge to check out their Only Fans because…well…their Insta was giving off a certain…vibe…that promised more than what that platform would allow, and if we’re gonna be honest here, what (non-twin, at least) gay man does not fantasize about a bit of twincest now and then? (Yes, I am the KING of run-on sentences.)

Well, imagine my disappointment when my curiosity finally got the better of me and I broke down and paid the admission fee. Not only was there no twincest going on behind that pay wall, but there were precious few fully exposed and erect penises—and then only rarely with both of them in the same shot. Plenty of movies of them showering (individually, but never together), no jerk-off movies (even solo), no cum-spurting pix, and most of the time even the dick pix had their fists covering the tips.

I mean seriously, guys. WTF? If I slap down money for your Only Fans, I want to see smut, not more pix of each of you individually preening in front of a mirror.

Needless to say I canceled the subscription immediately.

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Blue or Gold?

Just a bit of a rant…

Does this record look blue to you?


This is the “blue” vinyl pressing of Madonna’s True Blue I mentioned a while back that finally arrived.

Disappointed does not begin to describe it.

I immediately contacted the buyer who agreed to a return:

“If you wish. I did not manufacture the record so I am not sure what you expected.”

Excuse me? Then, in an attempt to make me the bad guy in this transaction, sent several followup emails, including one from someone not even involved in the transaction, dated September 2016!:

“Does anyone know why there were such variations in the colour of the Vinyl in the Aust edition? I have one that when not held against the light almost looks black and has a marble effect, and another that is perfect blue. Happy to post a pic if someone could help.”

The seller followed that up with, “Did you look at the photos?”

You mean the one you just sent with that two-and-a-half year old email?

And the final email received:

“A buyer asked me to send photos so I did. If you ask for photos of the item I can sedn them. Please remember that I DID NOT MANUFACTURE THE ALBUM”

If that weren’t enough, the vinyl grade of VG+ he assigned to the record itself was more than a bit overstated. The surface noise was horrific.

Even though he agreed to cover the cost of the disk itself, I was out on shipping. Considering it cost me an additional $25 to send the record back to Australia, honey, that ain’t happening. I lodged a complaint with Paypal, so I’m hoping to get the initial shipping fee refunded as well.

In the meantime, I discovered that True Blue had been reissued in 2016 by Sainsbury’s in the UK:

As you can see, the vinyl is truly blue.

It was a couple dollars more than I paid for the 1986 pressing, but this one is brand new and unplayed. Fingers crossed. It’s somewhere over the Atlantic as we speak…

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Fuck Target

We do our weekly grocery shopping at the local Super Target in the mall formerly known as Christown. We’ve been going there for years, and have generally been happy. Heck, when the store first opened it was amazing. Lately, however, it seems that they’ve either completely discontinued something we love and have purchased for years (Archer Farms brand multi-grain bread, for instance), or products suddenly appear with a marked-down tag, signaling their imminent demise. It doesn’t matter what it is; if we develop a fondness for something it seems to invariably disappear from the shelves.

Today we wanted to pick up some Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. The entire fucking freezer case was empty. “Oh we’re rearranging things.”

Another pastime of this store’s managers, it seems.

Kraft cheese? Gone. You can now only buy Market Pantry (Target’s own brand). A dozen eggs? Nope. You can now only purchase packs of 18, unless you want to pay through the nose to buy only 12. Target used to carry a huge assortment of frozen, ready-to-bake pies. Not any more. Two or three varieties available now.

When checking out, we’re usually asked, “Did you find everything you wanted?” but today we weren’t. It’s a blessing, I suppose. The poor checkout girl would’ve gotten a lot more than she bargained for if she’d asked. (And it’s not like they care, anyway. In the past when we’ve responded in the negative, we always get an “I’m sorry to hear that.” Not, “What were you looking for?” or even “What can we do to help?”

Why don’t we shop elsewhere? Well, there is both a Safeway and a Fry’s (Kroger) approximately equally distant—and closer to our house—than Target, but Safeway is a clusterfuck of the first order. The store will be overflowing with customers and they usually have only two or if you’re lucky, three checkout lanes open. They used to have self-checkout but I guess too many things were walking out the door.

Fry’s lot is hell to get in and out of, they don’t always have everything we need (as bad as Target), prices are higher, and the quality of the meat—surprisingly—is not as good. To their credit, both Safeway and Fry’s have a better selection of fresh fruit and vegetables than Target, but that’s not enough to offset all the negatives.

First world problems to be sure, but still annoying as hell.

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A Rapidly Spreading Cancer

They’re popping up like toadstools after a rainstorm, or more accurately, a rapidly-spreading cancer: multi-story apartment/condo complexes in central Phoenix that are destroying historic (although not protected) landmarks in their wake.*

It is a trend that started several years ago and shows absolutely no sign of abating—at least until the next housing crash mercifully puts it out of our misery.

Phoenix used to limit their multi-family developments to at most three stories in height. This saved the developer money because no elevators were required, and the complexes fit in nicely with the surrounding neighborhoods. But no more! Now 4, 5, or 6 stories are commonplace, and from the looks of it, all of these developments were designed by architects who have never set foot in a desert.

Dark charcoal gray—or black—or deeply colored exterior walls. Yup. Makes perfect sense in an environment where the sun beats down 90% of the time, fading everything (something I immediately noticed upon moving back from Denver) and whose heat will simply be absorbed to re-radiate at night, further increasing the heat bubble hovering over the city in summer and diverting any incoming thunderstorms.

Along those same clueless-designer lines, walls of glass. I’d hate to think of what the cooling bills will be for the units, even if the windows are double-paned. This actually started in the early aughts with a complex I actually lived in (although my particular unit was a more traditional design). Arioso boasted two story units with huge walls of glass

But hey, they all have granite countertops and laminate flooring so it’s all cool. Never mind that the vast majority of these units have no storage whatsoever. Years ago you’d get at least a coat/linen closet and a small outside store room on your patio/balcony. But I guess all that square footage adds up and could easily be allocated to even more units to rent out! And it seems their target demographic doesn’t own stuff anyway; these apartments/condos look to be more collegiate fuck pads than actual homes. And WTF is up with these “studios” with “bedrooms” with no windows or second means of egress? How does this meet code?!

And don’t even get me started on the ridiculous amount of rent they’re charging for these shoeboxes…

*Not actually destroying. They’re keeping the most architecturally iconic parts of the buildings to quiet the public outcry…and turning them into leasing/sales offices.

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It Finally Happened

It took nearly a decade, but I finally had a truly horrific encounter at Apple’s Genius Bar.

This was the third time the keyboard on my year-old MacBook Pro has gone out. This time it was the “b” and “n” keys. As of yesterday morning, both were either double-typing or not typing at all.

We arrived a few minutes before my scheduled appointment. Our genius acknowledged our presence and a few moments later had us at the Bar. Unfortunately, he was simultaneously servicing four other customers at the same time, and it was nearly 40 minutes before he actually addressed my issue.

Ben had a similar but worse problem with his MBP a few months ago. At that time my faith in Apple had been restored because instead of more bullshit sending the unit out for another top case replacement, the Genius spoke with his manager and simply swapped out the entire laptop. That is the Apple of old.

No such luck with me last night. First, the Genius insisted on taking the laptop to the back to blow out the keys—even though I’d told him I’d already done that multiple times with no improvement. That obviously did not solve the issue, so instead of proposing swapping the machine out, he said it would have to be sent out AGAIN for top case replacement. He didn’t even consider speaking with his manager to get it replaced outright.

Seriously? THIS IS THE THIRD FUCKING TIME IN A YEAR. Am I going to have to go through this every six months? It was obvious the guy was either new or had drunk too deeply of the Apple Kool-Aid. While he admitted that I was having trouble with this keyboard, he refused to acknowledge that this was a systemic problem affecting most of the 2016/2017 models. (Maybe they have a corporate gag order in place since they’ve been slapped multiple class-action lawsuits over the design of this keyboard.) In any case, it was obvious he was simply working from a script and not even considering deviating to “surprise and delight” the way Ben’s Genius had done.

I’m in a quandary about what to do when I get it back from repair (probably next Thurday or Friday). I can either sell it to a local reseller for a third of what I paid for it and possibly get a used 2015 or 2014 model that does not have these keyboard issues for a reasonable amount of money, or I can keep it and probably go through this bullshit every six months until my Apple Care runs out.

Except for the keyboard breaking down, I do genuinely like that laptop. It’s fast. The display is amazing. Touch ID is undeniably convenient. All things that are painfully obvious as I type away on Ben’s old 2010 MBP that I am so incredibly thankful we didn’t sell after he upgraded. (I’ve had to transfer my profile back and forth so many times now I’ve got it down to a science!)

And please, don’t tell me I to buy a Dell or an HP. I support those things at work, and the only thing I hate more than the 2016/17 MBP keyboards is Windows.